Toyota also build mobile homes, don't you know / the concept of qualia / some nsfw imagery at gatsu gatsu, a weblog / The Eyes Have It, a weblog - visual communcations in the healthcare sector, amongst other things / Vivus, a weblog dealing with architecture and design.

Two architectural exhibitions: Sylvia Grace Borda'sEast Kilbride: Scotland's First New Town, a flash-based historic tour around the much-maligned town, celebrating its architectural quirkiness and trying to lay to rest the myth that all New Towns were bleak, badly-designed and doomed from the off. The photography is very much from the 'New Blank Urbanism' school, i.e. romantic modern emptiness, spaces that revel in the absence of visible humanity, yet reveal human traces through inexorable traces of ageing and decay. See also Jason Oddy'sNewtopia at this week's Architecture Week, 'a photographic snapshot of the architecture of the Glasgow New Towns of East Kilbride and Cumbernauld.'

Urban Konsumterror: 'late capitalismís constant demand that we always consume more'. So who better to illustrate this constant consumption than Architectural Pac-Man, a metaphor for 'the use of signature architecture to draw in tourist dollars'.

Global news round-up. International refuse on St Kilda, 'including a Brazilian mustard container, Japanese washing up liquid bottle and Canadian oil drum' / vaguely related: a Texan diving mecca, populated by rusty old theme park rides and lorries. We seem to remember a similar thing is happening in Dubai, only with the hidden bonus of daily hauls of gold bullion to be found by lucky divers. Perhaps somewhere like The World (where, rumour has it, islands that correspond to down-at-heel real world locations aren't doing quite so well).

'Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.' Just what is the most 'meta' online aggregator? 'We now are reading what a collectivity algorithm derives from what other collectivity algorithms derived from what collectives chose from what a population of mostly amateur writers wrote anonymously.' And a discussion.

Transformer Houses, picked up by me-fi, although it's rather unfair to say that 'BLDBLOG is the new /., boingboing, nytimes, whatever. Great stuff, no doubt... but remarkably familiar.' That said, there is a certain familiarity about the subject matter of many weblogs, a desire to chronicle and catalogue a physical other that, without the internet, would remain an hinterland of the imagination. BLDBLOG is especially adept at dusting down the architectural and cultural remnants of past and future civilisations, sifting through the ruined foundations of grand schemes and technologies

A new look for Design Observer, which finally adds a 'designed' feel to a website that has established itself as one of the prime centres of educated debate about the design industry on the web / Paris and Banlieu, a photoset tackling the rather banal post-modern housing that crept up to the edges of Paris in the 1970s and 80s / could Wayne Hemingway be the Jane Jacobs of Suburbia?

This query was helpful, but didn't prepare us for 2,000 spam messages in a single hour this morning. Filters are your friend.

Is London's skyline a 'tragic parody of development control'? Airspace, a new exhibition, hopes to present the architects' and developers' side of the story, presenting a series of panoramas and asking us, the public, to vote on which they like best. What about a city without tall buildings? Or one where tall buildings are clustered together? Or one where planning controls are pretty much abandoned altogether? These are interesting images, but ultimately unhelpful. The virtual city is segueing inexorably into the physical one, a transition lubricated by money and little else.

Random themes that are all somehow linked. They came from outer space, Tom Dyckhoff on Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture 1956-2006 at the Barbican, and the work of Constant Nieuwenhuys in particular: 'New Babylon was a city not of sin but of pleasure. Constant imagined a future in which humans, freed into permanent leisure by technology, would endlessly have fun.'

How endless would the fun be? In 'Among the Transhumanists: Cyborgs, self-mutilators, and the future of our race', Slate William Saletan looks at the subculture of body alteration. This is aworld away from the one-man in-joke that is Kevin Warwick, perhaps the best-known exponent of cyber-enhancement in the UK. This is far more serious stuff, delving into arcana like 'the self-demand amputation community' and the even rockier ethical path of living forever: Aubrey de Grey, immortalist, 'also floated the creepy idea that overpopulation might not become a problem because once we're immortal, we might realize children are no fun'. A world of endless fun yet without any children implies some confusion ahead.

'The Land of Milk and Bunny: What Peter Rabbit can teach businesses about going global', over at Grist Magazine. Beatrix Potter is huge in Japan, which gobbles up a sizeable chunk of the $500m spent each year on Peter Rabbit branded goods. Unfortunately the article is a mangled collection of platitudes that relate to so-called 'sustainable branding'; e.g. 'think multi-local,' and worry about the impact of Japanese tourists on Cumbria / Purse Lip Square Jaw on the Internet of Things.

The sounds of space: you can listen again to a piece on this morning's Today programme (0745am) about the noises picked up in the depths of the universe. Related, 'Pioneer spacecraft data saved.' Bizarrely, thirty years of mission data was under threat as the agency wasn't up to looking after the 'old 7- and 9-track magnetic tapes'. Apparently there's something called the PioneerAnomaly that needs further study: 'the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft are not where they are supposed to be.'

The urban imagery of George Orwell (via Caterina). In pre-WWII Europe, Orwell found Barcelona to be far more vital than London, which was a 'shabby and dirty' place that was eventually to be sullied by ugly war memorials and devastation. We dug out the image of future London from the controversial 1954 teleplay of 1984., which, despite its rather high-tech undertones, aptly conveys Orwell's vision of the city as a rather stony, authoritarian place, with awkward totalitarian architecture staked out across public spaces to oversee everyone.

The four Gasometers in Vienna (thanks Paul), converted to housing and offices by Jean Nouvel (A), Coop Himmelblau (B), Manfred Wehdorn (C) and Wilhelm Hozbauer (D). A similar thing is happening to the gasometers at London's Kings Cross, skeletal remains of industry that are being dismantled, moved, and rebuilt, all the while surrounded by the vast Argent King's Cross development. But has there ever been a more redundant piece of architecture than a disused gasometer? Great monuments of industrial architecture they may be, but they fail to work as coherent pieces of cityscape, becoming objects for the sake of objects.